Tag Archives: David Caddy

The Tears in the Fence editors now offer more Mentoring and Critical Appraisals in poetry, drama, performance, scriptwriting and voice work.

Playwright, Performance Studies Lecturer, and poet, Louise Buchler is offering Mentoring in Scriptwriting and Verse Drama under the same scheme. She has more than twelve years of experience lecturing in Writing for both Stage and Screen. She made the shortlist for the National Theatre London’s Africa Playwriting Competition recognising her as one of the top twenty playwrights on the African continent. Her plays have been widely performed. Her poetry has been published in Tears in the Fence and various publications in South Africa. Louise is also available for Performance and Voice coaching. Please email Louise at tearsinthefence@gmail.com

Poet, essayist and editor, David Caddy offers critical appraisals and mentoring in Poetry, Flash Fiction and Publication for other literary genres and projects. This involves taking a manuscript from first draft to publication, advising on where to send your work and the range of available options for a prospective poet and author.

Recent comments on their mentoring include:

‘The appraisals from David and Louise were thoughtful and precise. Their feedback ranged from specific matters of craft to the broader question of how I might take my writing forward. They responded to the work on its own terms and even picked up on recurring motifs and concerns I hadn’t been aware of myself.’ Phil Baber

‘David’s critical appraisals are immeasurably helpful. His work
towards my first full collection was immensely useful.’ Jessica Mookherjee

‘David’s close and perceptive reading of each poem, help with ordering and sequencing my pamphlet collections, and support with my first full collection has been enormous. I thoroughly recommend his critical and mentoring services.’ Geraldine Clarkson

Twenty-five years ago Carcanet published an anthology of poems edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville. Crozier had been, of course, the founder of Ferry Press and Longville, in close collaboration with both John Riley and Gordon Jackson, had been the founder of Grosseteste Press. The introduction to A Various Art opens assertively:

This anthology represents our joint view of what is most interesting, valuable, and distinguished in the work of a generation of English poets now entering its maturity, but it is not an anthology of English, let alone British poetry. We did not begin with this distinction in mind; indeed, had we done so it might have appeared that there were no operative criteria by which to proceed. We knew this was not the case. Why, then, make such a distinction, as though the work of English or British poets did not belong to the general category of their national poetry?

The poets included in this seminal anthology are central to the developing quality of poetry in this country and many of them are still writing and publishing. In the words of Iain Sinclair, from his introduction to another central anthology Conductors of Chaos, ‘If these things are difficult, they have earned that right. Why should they be easy? Why should they not reflect some measure of the complexity of the climate in which they exist? Why should we not be prepared to make an effort, to break sweat, in hope of high return? There’s no key, no Masonic password; take the sequences gently, a line at a time. Treat the page as a block, sound it for submerged sonar effects. Suspend conditioned reflexes.’

Sinclair’s point is that ‘if it comes too sweetly, somebody is trying to sell you something.’

In the current issue of PN Review there is an account of David Caddy’s So Here We Are (Shearsman Press) and its concluding sentence makes a point that associates Caddy’s work with precisely the assertive statements informing the introduction to A Various Art:

‘Beneath the attractive guise of belles-lettres we are alerted to the timbre of dissident voices whose music will continue to be heard through the jamming signals put out by the official keepers of the canon.’

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, has just produced a new book on Prynne’s poetry. Written by Wit Píetrzak, an Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lódź in Poland, this book is divided into four sections:

Subjectivity under Siege

Disentangling the Subject

Beyond Stagnation

Stories of Disentanglement in Blue Slides at Rest

The author’s acknowledgements page conveys an engagement with the work which is thoroughly explored in this splendid new book. Wit Píetrzak writes that his book ‘is the result of a sudden, yet profound fascination with the poetry of J.H. Prynne. Not only has his work exerted an enormous influence over my

understanding and appreciation of poetry but also has brought about changes in my perception of the task of the literary critic.’

‘There are books that we simply have to write, in order to put in writing the genuine amazement with a particular oeuvre, to phrase the peculiar thrall in which it has kept us; this is one of those books.’

On a personal note it is heartening to see that there are numerous quotations in this book from David Caddy, Rod Mengham, Simon Perril and Nigel Wheale whose essays on Prynne appeared in A Manner of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne, edited by Ian Brinton (Shearsman 2009). Ian will be contributing an account of the late Prynne poem, ‘As Mouth Blindness’, to Tears 57.

Thanks to Peter Riley I now have a copy of the review of Kitchen Poems that Douglas Oliver wrote for a Cambridge newspaper. Titled ‘Pioneer in Poetry’ it is a refreshing view of that early sequence of pieces that had first appeared in Andrew Crozier’s The English Intelligencer. Here is a taster:

‘Prynne’s verse-line is often itself a glissade, but an intricate one always subject to a masterly use of pause. Line-endings and beginnings are important clues to what he is doing, partly because of the way they make meaning stagger into the awkward and difficult entrances and partly as a clue to the glissade’s return and departure.’